The FFW logo appears on the screen before “Focus” by Ariana Grande begins to play. Then we see the studio being set up, the glass table sat in the center being cleaned, two cups sat on opposite sides of the table. Next we see Zack Hudson tying his shoes and checking himself in the mirror before he heads out to the set as a producer puts a microphone on his shirt before sitting down. When he looks across, we next see the various men and women who make up FFW and Future Shock flash by in images from their careers until it finally stops on Missy.
Then we cut through highlights of her FFW and Future Shock career culminating in most recently becoming the Future Shock Champion. The show goes inside the studio, and finds her sitting across from Zack at the glass table.
Zack: Hello, fans. Welcome to the latest edition of Focus here exclusively on FFW All Access. I’m Zack Hudson, and I have the pleasure of getting to talk with the reigning Future Shock Champion Missy.
He turns the chair around and shakes hands with the champion before getting comfortable back in his seat.
Zack: MIssy, welcome to Focus. I’m very glad to have you, especially after we’ve had one or two people I know very close to you in that seat.
Missy: Thanks, Zack. I’m glad to be here, even if talking about myself is something I usually avoid like the plague.
She gave him a small smile, showing she wasn’t entirely comfortable with the thought of talking about herself.
Zack: I can understand that. I don’t go around telling everyone all the details of my life either, but you’re in a much different position than me. You’re an accomplished athlete who has had many awards and titles in your name from FFW, Future Shock and places like the SWF where you were before you came here. So I can’t blame people for being curious to learn more about you.
He started to grin now.
Zack: I mean they could be interested in far worse people, right?
She gave a small laugh and a little shrug.
Missy: I guess I have done quite a bit that a couple of people might find interesting, yeah.
Zack: I like to think so. And if this turns out to be the least watched episode of Focus, then we’ll know, right? Let’s begin at the best place…the beginning. Tell everyone about your family growing up. Obviously we know about Cassandra, but give us some background to get started.
Missy: I had a fairly normal childhood to be honest. There was Mum, Dad, me and Cass. At least at first.
Missy paused for a moment and took a sip of water.
Missy: We were never what you’d class as well off back then, but my mum and dad both worked hard to give me and Cass everything two young yorkshire lasses could want or need. We lost my dad when me and Cass were five in an accident and… well things got tougher after that. My mum worked three jobs at some points to make sure she kept a roof over our heads and food on the table. I think that’s where I got my work ethic from to be honest. Watching my mum work so hard kind of rubbed off on me I guess.
Zack: With your mom being such a worker bee and making sure she covered everything you two needed, did you find yourself leaning on your sister more and vice versa? I can’t imagine the divide between you two started that far back, but I could be wrong.
Missy: We were as thick as thieves back then to be honest. My mum remarried a couple of years after we lost my dad and our step-dad… well he wasn’t the nicest of people. He managed to hide it from my mum for a good long while because she was so busy working three jobs, but that really made me and Cass stick together. Our issues didn’t start until much later. We were best friends as well as sisters at one point, as hard as that might be to believe now.
Zack nodded as he listened.
Zack: I can believe that. I spoke with the only other set of twins in the company on this show, namely Tara. And that sounds fairly familiar, and like you two, I’d say they are pretty divided now too, and not just on rosters. Tell me about school. What kind of clique, if any, did you find yourself in? I’m guessing athletics might have been a major influence?
Missy: You’d actually be wrong there, Zack. I wasn’t really into athletics at school. I did pretty well academically at school, but I was known quite a bit for misbehaving and causing mischief… that’s where mischief maker actually came from. To be honest, it’s where my in ring name of Missy came from too. I was always being told by my teachers, ‘you’ll never amount to anything if you don’t pull your socks up, missy’. I proved them wrong though and managed to finish in the top five of my high school class before moving onto college.
Zack: Was there a particular subject that you found you excelled in or just enjoyed most?
Missy: In high school I was pretty much an all rounder, although I did particularly excel at English. Especially when it came to debating. Who would have thought, me, good at arguing.
She gives a cheeky wink and a small smile.
Missy: Once I moved to college I concentrated on Business Management and Corporate Finance. Which I was pretty good at I’d say, since I managed to get my degree.
Zack: Well done there. My father always told me it’s good to have something to fall back on that isn’t your behind in life. Clearly you’re past that point of needing to worry there. What were some of your interests at that time? All work and no play makes Missy a dull girl, to turn a phrase. What were your passions?
Missy: It was actually while I was at college that I got into wrestling. A local wrestling academy was hosting an open day and me and a few friends decided to go along just for a laugh, to be honest, but once I was there… I surprised quite a few people, including myself by being a natural. I was hooked after that, to the point that I actually switched to the wrestling academy full time and completed my degree via open learning. I definitely got bitten by the wrestling bug, big time.
Zack gets a curious expression as he hears this.
Zack: Now see there, that’s something I really haven’t heard much. You weren’t a fan. It wasn’t really on your radar. You just went for the lulz, and found out you had a high aptitude for it and got hooked. I imagine your mom didn’t exactly see that in your future when she was raising you and your sister. How did she react when you told her you wanted to do this?
Missy: Mum was of course a little skeptical. She knew nothing about the wrestling industry and didn’t want her daughter to get taken advantage of or to struggle the way she had. Her mind was put to rest a bit though when I continued to study for my degree via open learning on evenings and weekends. And it didn’t hurt that I managed to get into modeling to pay my way through my training and studies.
Zack: That explains all the gifs I see posted, not to mention all the bikini pictures you used to get chastised about for posting.
He said with a grin.
Zack: Now we know where most of them came from.
She laughs and gives another shrug.
Missy: Yup. That’s where a lot of them came from, some come from the fact I married a photographer too. But I’ve never been ashamed of my modeling, even when opponents try to use it as low hanging fruit to get under my skin. Why would I be ashamed of something that enabled me to pay my way through training and studies without getting into debt? I’m a self made woman, and there’s no part of anything that led me to where I am now that I think I should be ashamed of.
Zack: Nor should you. I always thought that was a dumb attack line too. Especially when I Google almost anyone on either roster, I’m going to find them in bikinis and the like too. So how long did you train before you found yourself in your first promotion, which I believe was the Shadow Wrestling Federation?
Missy: I spent a year full time at the academy before spending three years moving between several small UK promotions. Shadow Wrestling Federation was the first professional company that I worked for, and with them being an international touring promotion it was a massive difference to what I was used to. I went from wrestling matches with audiences anywhere from 15-50 people to suddenly performing in sold out arenas. It completely blew my mind.
Zack: As you’ve said in promos like the one against Sofia a few weeks ago, people might be surprised to learn that you were quite the brawler and hardcore style athlete there. We haven’t seen a lot of that since you came here. Was that another case of something you found you were good at or was it more of a vent for issues circulating at the time?
Missy: It was probably a little of both to be honest. My very first match in SWF was in an Elimination Chamber with a shot at the world title for the winner. I know I was only really thrown in to make up the numbers but I managed to make it to the final three, which nobody saw coming. I think that’s where my love of hardcore came from, and the fact that I was damn good at it didn’t hurt either. Plus, it was a really good way to work out frustrations and you might not have noticed, but I do tend to have maybe a tiny bit of a short fuse.
Zack: It has come up once in a while since you came to FFW. I mean there was Cereza, there was Mallory Bennett, and most recently, there was Sofia. But it sounds like the SWF saw far more of that side of you than we have in FFW. You set all kinds of records and stood out there, so what made you decide it was time for new horizons? What brought you to Future Shock?
Missy: SWF definitely did see the hardcore side of me that’s for sure. It’s kind of a long story of what finally made me leave… but in a nutshell, I was the majority shareholder in SWF by the time I left and Cassandra decided to pretend to be me and signed my shares over to my ex. Which as you can imagine… did not go down well. I won’t go into the gory details, but my friend and old trainer Luke, got me on a plane and out of the country as quickly as he could before I did something that there would have been no coming back from.
Missy takes another sip of water and lets out a deep breath slowly.
Missy: I actually started in another two promotions before Future Shock, but both were gone a month and change after I joined. I got chatting to Adam on Twitter around the same time and he invited me to come and see what Future Shock was all about, and I agreed to sign the minute I did.
Zack: And luckily for you, it’s survived far longer than the other two you were with at the time. Sounds like Adam recruited you directly then, and it didn’t take long for you to decide this was the right fit. Were there any major differences in Future Shock compared to the places you previously called home?
Missy: I think the only real difference was the roster. Being on an all female roster was completely new territory to me. I was used to intergender matches, so that took a little getting used to at first.
Zack: Probably not too much of a surprise though, considering it’s an all female roster anyway.
He said with a smile.
Zack: During these visits and chats you two were having, is that where you noticed some kind of sparks with him? Because when I ask him about this, well..I’m not sure how serious he is in his version of the story. So you tell me.
Missy: At the time when we first met, we were both in other relationships, so I never really paid much attention to any sparks. It was clear we got on well, but in my mind, there was no point thinking about anything else, since neither of us were available.
Zack: Remind me later and I’ll tell you his version of events. Tell us about how it all began then, because here you are years later happily married. He even took your birthday off recently on the day of a show, which is highly unlike someone who works as much as he does.
Missy: Well, I don’t think it’s any secret that we were good friends before anything ever happened between us. I’d been single for a while when Adam and Mel split up, but still I didn’t do anything, until Scarlett decided to start acting like she was going to ask him out. She knows me well enough to know that would give me the push I needed to tell Adam how I felt before anybody else had a chance to and well, the rest there is history, I guess. And you’re not kidding about it being unusual for him to take a show day off, I was surprised myself when he said he was taking the day off. Though I think that the fact that we both work as hard as each other, does help to make our marriage work.
Zack: I’d say it speaks to how strong you two are. I’m glad you brought up Scarlett there, because I was going to ask how you two met. You don’t seem like two people who would get along all that well, just given your personalities. How did that friendship begin?
Missy: The friendship honestly is a fairly newish development. We met when we were both in SWF, and to say we didn’t get on would be the understatement of the century. I tend to take offense to other women sleeping with my partners.
She pauses a second and takes another sip of water.
Missy: When she arrived at FFW and decided to start trying to help me… which I neither needed or wanted, it kind of opened the lines of communication, and with Christian Kincaid managing us both at the time, he acted as sort of a mediator between us. She still drives me round the bend sometimes, but she has honestly become one of my best friends, despite our differences.
Zack: I can see how that might bother a woman, yes. There’s another name worth mentioning. You hired Christian almost as soon as you arrived, and he’s been in your corner for pretty much every success you’ve had in the company from day one. I assume you just ran into each other at a show or did you see he was already managing some very successful women at the time? How did that come about?
Missy: You know, it’s been that long I can’t even remember now. If I recall though, I played for his LFL team for a while when I was still on the Future Shock roster and then when I graduated to FFW he started accompanying me to the ring too. Seeing some of the antics that went on in some of the matches, I thought it would be a good idea to have someone in my corner who wouldn’t interfere but would even up the odds if anybody else tried to.
Zack: Not to mention helps you train for your matches. So tell us what a typical day in the life of Missy is. Let’s say it’s not a show day and you’re home in Boston. Walk us through it.
Missy: I’m usually up with the larks and then it’s out for a run or head off to the gym, sometimes both to be honest. I spend a lot of time training, which probably wouldn’t surprise most people. I sometimes pick up breakfast or brunch on my way back to share with Adam to make him take a break from work for a short time at least. Then I’ll check in on my own businesses… this is the part that will probably surprise most people. Cass is always going on about her businesses and her money, but I’ve never felt the need to. I’ve been pretty savvy over the years though and have built up a nice little portfolio of business, including a gym that I bought last year.
Zack: And the evenings? I don’t see much in the way of tweets from either of you during the latter evening, so I presume that’s quality time there.
Missy: Yeah, we’re both on the go pretty much all day every day, so evenings are when we switch off. Figuratively more than literally, just in case of emergencies, but we’ll usually have dinner and then settle down to watch a movie or show. Or go out to eat, or whatever takes our fancy really. Neither of us has ever really felt the need to give the world a running commentary on what we do as a couple.
Zack: Before we wrap up here, one last thing that I’ve not really asked anyone else. But what are three things that you are most grateful for in life? It can be anything at all.
Missy: I’m going to cheat a little and count loved ones as my first thing, that way I can fit them all in. Health is definitely another and third probably sounds cliche, but wrestling. Getting to do what I love as a career, that’s something to be pretty grateful for I think.
Zack: That’s more than relatable. Missy, I want to thank you for joining me today and giving everyone a glimpse into your life. I think even your most ardent fan probably learned something, if not a lot. I hope you had a good time.
He started to grin.
Zack: And if Adam doesn’t cancel the show after this one, I’ll assume you did.
Then he turns to the camera.
Zack: We have quite a few guests lined up in upcoming episodes, fans. Thank you for watching on FFW All Access, and I’ll see you at the arenas.
He turns back to shake Missy’s hand before Focus fades to black.
